Topic: 3DSWare drought?

Okay, I'm starting to get a bit uneasy about how the eShop will turn out. There's hardly been any 3DSWare games out as of this month, and the system was released back in late-March. Seven months had passed and there's still virtually no 3DS games in the shop. Don't get me wrong, I know that games take a long time to develop, but I'd think that by now, more games would've been announced for the shop.

This is definitely due in part to Apple's App Store: not only do a lot of consumers have an iDevice, but the store's accessibility and low barriers are very attractive to indie developers. <Sigh> , makes me think that the openness and ease of the smartphone platform is spoiling them and driving them to reluctance toward the console platforms. Luckily, Sony quickly learned how to entice indie developers. Microsoft...I get a feeling that Xbox Live Arcade is losing its steam.

What's really worrying me is the future. Apple's approach to digital distribution of apps had gathered favorable response from many consumers and developers alike that this had made life easier for lots of us and it seems to be an evolutionary step for many people. I mean think about it: low prices, the popularity, the ability to set prices, profit from thousands of copies because of the low price. My belief in life balancing itself tells me that with the new distribution model comes a consequence. That consequence could be the declining variety of games in the downloadable console games market. The only real possible way for console games to effectively compete with the app stores is to copy their distribution model, but now that would contradict the retail games with their higher price. Yes, retail games are more fleshed out of course, but low price is getting to people's head (i.e. Steam sales, $0.99 mobile games, criticism of VC's prices) now that the United States and the rest of the world are financially wounded from natural disasters and the 2008 US recession.

And because of this, I am not too fond of smartphones. AGAIN, I am weary of smartphones solely because they could severely affect game consoles (the handhelds, of course). Oh, I don't know. I'm probably overreacting, but the idea came into my head once I saw the multiple weeks with little interesting contents in Nintendo's online stores and people complaining about it. Any thoughts? Criticisms?

There's already a thread in the 3DS forum "(IGN Article) 3DS Drought" you may want to also post in...

It not a drought if it never rained before, I guess.

The 3DSware drought I feel is a whole seperate issue to the 3DS drought. I understand that small indie developers are tentative about developing for such a young system when they are so many options about and given a choice if you wanted to maximize sales but still develop for a Nintendo system I still feel like DSiware would be their first choice...
however, 'Pyramids' was a 3DSware exclusive and I think it paid off, hopefully this will lead to more developers taking the risk instead of porting over a title like Gameloft did.
Once momentum picks up I think it will be ok. But aside from the VC and 3D classics I dont feel like the 3DSware drought will be over for a long while yet.

@bobbiKat - Apple actually has very little influence over the actual eShop. While they and other smartphone providers may cut into Nintendo's share of the handheld market, they hold no real influence over what gets released here. It's up to developers who feel it's a good idea to developer for the eShop to actually develop games for the platform. The more likely culprit (imo) is the amount of time developers have had to develop for the eShop. Chances are, they've probably only had dev kits for a little amount of time, and those that do have the kits are more likely to develop games for the 3DS as opposed to the eShop while they are practically guranteed shelf space at stores with the few 3DS games being released right now. Give the service time. There's a ton of good games such as, but certainly not limited to Push & Pull, Mighty Switch Force, VVVVVV, Mutant Mudds, Freakyforms (which launches next week), and Dillon's Rolling Western that will soon be released. Just wait paitently and enjoy any DSiWare you might've missed while you're waiting for the monsoon to arrive.

the same thing happened with DSiWare, and the same thing happened with WiiWare too. just be patient and the library of available games will flesh itself out.

Well, the DSiWare and WiiWare wasn't very popular, but that's Nintendo's fault for putting up archaic policies and deciding the prices. Any who, I look forward to the upcoming games in the eShop. Maybe the App Store could help developers look into console games for development now that they have experience and financial stability to develop for them. We'll just have to see what goes on for the next few months.

I think you picked the worst time to post this thread because Pyramids just came out, we've heard about a whole bunch of eShop exclusive games and in the next two weeks we get Freakyforms and Kirby(in 3D!).

In general though it makes more sense for a small publishers to target DSiware so they can not only sell games to 3DS owners but the tens of millions of DSi owners too. To make an App Store comparison how many games only work on the latest models? A small minority.

3DSWare has only really just started... and I'm guessing developing a game to be played in 3D must be pretty hard. So 3DSWare releases might be far and few between, but when developers can start making good games and start getting them out then it'll start growing from there.

Also, as Oregano mentioned, developers can make games for DSiWare that target both 3DS and DSi owners. That then makes their game sell a lot more, meaning more money to maybe bring that game over to a full 3DSWare game or create a whole new game for 3DSWare exclusively.

There's already Freakyforms coming on the way and maybe from there on it'll start expanding. Just takes time for new platforms to grow.

They also suffered from a lack of media exposure, as the majority of gaming websites wrote off DSiWare before the service was 2 months old and only bothered reviewing Dark Void Zero and Shantae: Risky's Revenge after that, if they bothered reviewing those games, and the only WiiWare I ever saw a tv commercial for was Pokémon: Rumble Blast. And, just because Nintendo's policies on pricing are different from Apple's doesn't make Apple the superior company; tons of games their have little to no exposure and there's more terrible games uploaded every week to the service than Nintendo could ever fathom putting out on their downloadable services.

Thank you guys for your quotes. This is a different story, but I wanna say: I wish I could make a game for the eShop right away.

today it the 10 of november and no freakyform yet what going on

@yellita1964 - the eShop updates at 12 PM EST in North America on Thursdays, so it should be updated within the next 5-10 minutes from when I'm typing this.

Wow. Even I couldn't have come up with a statement so negative towards Nintendo's future.

But yes. Sadly, the eShop is turning out exactly the same as the other two download portals.

Talk about a bunch of bitter Betty's! lol... There have been and there will continue to be great games on 3DS e-shop like the recently released PUSHMO and MUTANT MUDDS. (: Thank you!

@grumblegrumble - You also revived a 3-month dead thread, before we had games like Mighty Switch Force and Pushmo. I personally think the drought is over, since we're getting a game about every other week, so, yeah.